San Diego Charger D.J. Fluker at his mother's new home in Mobile, Ala., Saturday, June 20, 2013.

MOBILE, Ala.  This is not a shelter. This is not a car. This is not a van.

This has not been washed out, burned down or blown away.

The house D.J. Fluker bought in a quiet West Mobile neighborhood has outer walls built of brick, red and brown with white spots, stacked under a gray-shingle triangular roof. The ceilings are high and the kitchen is spacious, large enough for his 2-year-old son L.J. to run in circles. The rooms, four with three baths, and square footage, 3,000-plus, outnumber the ideas how to fill them.

San Diego Charger D.J. Fluker with his mother Annice Fluker at her new home in Mobile Ala., Saturday, June 20, 2013.
Michael Spooneybarger

San Diego Charger D.J. Fluker with his mother Annice Fluker at her new home in Mobile Ala., Saturday, June 20, 2013.

This is more than somewhere to live.

This is a place not to flee.

Last April, the Chargers sought to stabilize their offensive line when drafting Fluker, a former Alabama right tackle, with the No. 11 overall pick. The plan worked both ways. A first-round guaranteed contract gave the Flukers stability in a life that previously had none, where the panic and toll of Hurricane Katrina is one chapter to a survival tale.

Fluker, his mother, younger brother and two younger sisters ached with hunger in the bottom barrels of their stomachs. They operated the oven at night, not to bake but to keep warm. They endured the horror of domestic violence and moved place to place, staying together amid conditions that threatened to split them apart.

And that car. That car. For weeks, all five sleeping in that damn car.

Her name was Katrina, and she was a Rottweiler puppy with puppy eyes and a puppy mouth and a puppy tail.

The Flukers found her when they returned to their neighborhood in New Orleans' Lower Ninth Ward, assessing hurricane damage that was absolute. Everything was gone at 2128 Gordon St.; their old building was a cleared slab. But down the street, they found the dog they would call Katrina.

She was under a car, scared and hungry, with her mother but without a home. The family wondered how she survived and took her in, maybe because her situation reminded them of their own.

When escaping Katrina in August of 2005, they twice-crossed the Biloxi Bay Bridge in Mississippi that was in no condition to be crossed at all. The family was in between living situations, a new place in Biloxi and old place in New Orleans. Most of their belongings were still in New Orleans. Annice Fluker, D.J.'s mother, hadn't been watching TV and was unaware of the city's condition. She loaded up the kids in the Ford Escort to drive there.

The sons protested. They had seen the news.

"We were on the verge of dying, and we knew it," D.J. Fluker says.

Authorities turned the family away from New Orleans, an area drowning in engineering failure. After crossing the 1.6-mile bridge once, the little Escort had to again.

The sky was a running faucet. The wind screamed as if afraid of the dark. Water from the rising bay smacked against the swaying bridge, which connects Biloxi to U.S. 90, and the damage that was coming ultimately snapped the structure into several pieces, forcing a closure that lasted more than two years.